Eurydice
The work is comprised of two installations jointly titled 72.
The first art work, titled My Ka’bah: My Pilgrim’s Progress, is drawn and hand-embroidered on canvas (7’x6’8”x5’4”) with hand-dyed thread which is draped on a construction of plywood, wood, silk drapery and faux brick (8’x6’8”x5’4” total). It is discussed elsewhere under the title Sappho in the Time of The Suicide Bomber.
The second art work, titled Paradise Is Always Shameless: 72 R Waiting, is a 6’ (15” high) square base made of plywood and wood. Media: 72 Barbies, one Bin Laden doll, artificial tree (5’ high), moss, flowers and wedding arrangements, embroidery, spraypaint.
This installation is predicated on my heritage where my alter ego stems from. I was born on the Gree island of Lesbos, burdened by the confusing weighted cultural inheritance of being a Lesbian, with the poet Sappho as my most famous ancestor. I lived under a junta and helped topple it in my teens. As part of that experience I joined illegal underground political groups, spraypainted graffiti on walls at night, recruited more youths willing to die for the cause of national independence and freedom (the motto was Freedom or Death), ran away from the police, and demonstrated against American imperialism, since the Junta was supported by American interests. I became an American citizen after 9/11 in support of my adopted country, only to find myself living again in conditions akin to those of my childhood and to discover, slowly and uncannily, that the Middle-Eastern part of my heritage understood suicide bombers who, as I had for years, wanted to die in a burst of flames for a noble and heroic cause. For decades Motherland, not individuality, was my idealized connection to life and its reason. So I can see both sides of this long conflict between (Muslim) East and West.
My grandfather was a priest who never cut his hair or shaved and wore long dark robes all his adult life; toward the end of his life he looked exactly like the photo of Saddam Hussein caught in his spiderhole by the American invaders. My first cousin, to whom I am especially close, looks like Moktada al Sadr. My grandmother always dressed in black, covering up her body and her head to go outside the house. So I am not unfamiliar with the reverence that associates womanhood with modesty and “respect” in contrast to the excess and liberation of Western womanhood. Greece is the cradle of Western culture but it also stands at the crossroads between East and West and, after 500 years of Turkish (Muslim) occupation, its culture resembles the nonfundamentalist Muslim cultures of the Middle East more than it resembles that of its fellow West European powers. I rebelled against what I saw as repression because I believe in “coming out”, in “lifting the lid”, in Revelation of every sort.
My work has a strong spiritual inspiration. I am interested in the conflation of art and religion, so potent in earlier times, and so important to artists of all ages from the cave paintings on. This work is meant to evoke the power of a spiritual pilgrimage. The plywood construction is an exact replica of the holy Ka’bah in Mecca, which every Muslim aspires to visit in a holy hajj (pilgrimage) and circle around it 7 times. It is worshipped in such reverence that hundreds can die each year during high holy times, crushed by the stampeding crowds trying to get close to the monument. Although representation of the human body is forbidden in Muslim religion, every other religion before it depended on the power of visual sanctified evocations. The images on my replica evoke life-size worshippers-guardians along the path to a temple that have been found in ancient sites in Minoan and classical Greece, Pharaonic Egypt, Summeria, Mesopotamia (Iraq, Iran), the Hindu valley and China. The Karyatids, for example, the women-shaped columns that support the temple of the Parthenon, are called Kouroi or kore, and from that name derives the name Houri, which is the Muslim name for the women awaiting the faithful in Paradise (a word that sounds ominously close to “whore”). According to Muslim sacred texts, carnal adventures in Paradise take place under a tree (of life) by a river (of life), eating grapes, and enjoying diverse sexual acts with the wives of friends the Jihadist-martyr may have coveted or Western movie stars (for example, Bin Laden is known to be in love with Whitney Houston).
The use of 72 Barbies exemplifies the superficiality, plasticity, muteness of the pliable and sexy female models available for the martyr's indiscriminate varied sexual gratification, and in particular brings out the irony of the Americanization of this fundamentalist fantasy and methodology, which is true of all the publicity and propaganda- and media-related methods of the Muslim terrorist organizations. American babes, American dolls, available in endless quantities, shapes, colors, and configurations, all of them conventionally beautiful, are the Heavenly promise. What better real-life model then, for the Muslim tree of life, than a plastic tree populated by plastic naked aroused and cavorting perennially preteen Barbie dolls? Barbie was "Muse" to some of the world's better artists, from Andy Warhol to Peter Max, Chris Jordan and architect Robert A M Stern, but the doll itself is rarely abused, both physically and sexually, as my Barbies always are, echoing their human counterparts. In my aesthetics, a Barbie asks for S/M, military, sexual, or other. In a nod to my past of spraypainting on walls and to the tradition of political signage as public space abuse and prototerrorist activity, many of my Barbies are spraypainted with Muslim or American flags and similar insignia.
This installation is predicated on the vexing Muslim religious concept that a man is rewarded for dying a gruesome and murderous martyr’s death with ample liberated sex with 72 beautiful eagerly awaiting virginal women. This belief in rewarding earthly violence with heavenly erotic bliss strikes the West as ironic. The obvious contradiction in Western eyes between extreme earthly piousness and afterlife lasciviousness stems from the West’s opposite experience of life and afterlife: we see Paradise as the absence of bodily pleasure which we are allowed to experience, in varying degrees, in life; Muslims see in Paradise the fulfillment of the sexual urges and pleasures that they are forbidden in life. No No wonder so many young people are eager to give their lives for entry to sexual heaven.
This is my fantasy, were I Bin Laden or an associate of his, of Paradise.
Eurydice